The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister. The headline numbers are designed to focus mi

For founders and investors in the UK watching how tokenised equity infrastructure matures elsewhere, a partnership announced on 8 July between two US tokenisation specialists offers a useful signal. The biggest obstacle to broker dealer adoption has rarely been the technology. It has been the regula

Barclays published a report with PwC on 9 July putting a number on something the UK tokenisation sector has mostly argued from instinct rather than evidence: what the technology is actually worth to the country. The answer, according to "Rewiring Finance: Tokenisation as a Catalyst for UK Growth", is up to £33bn in additional GDP per year by 2035, with roughly two thirds of that benefit landing outside financial services altogether. Just think about that, Most tokenisation c

For anyone in the UK still weighing whether tokenised equity is a real market or a slide in a pitch deck, the past week offered a concrete answer. On 2 July, Securitize began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ, and on the same day it made its own newly listed shares availab

The most important developments in tokenisation are rarely the loud ones. They tend to happen in the settlement layer, the part of finance almost nobody outside the back office ever thinks about, and they decide whether an idea that works in a pilot can survive contact with real institutional money.

Settlement is the least glamorous word in finance and quite possibly the most important. It is the moment a trade actually completes, when cash and asset change hands and the deal becomes real. For decades that moment has taken days, propped up by a chain of intermediaries each taking a cut and addi

There is a neat circularity to the week ahead in New York. Securitize, the firm that turns funds run by BlackRock, Apollo and VanEck into blockchain tokens, is itself about to become a publicly traded share. On 29 June its merger partner holds the shareholder vote. If it passes, as expected, the com

A view from the author on where this is heading, and why the noise about crypto misses the point entirely.

The backers include HSBC, BNP Paribas and Citadel Securities, a sign that the institutions which run capital markets now want to own the rails underneath them.

For most of its short history, tokenisation has had a quiet structural problem. Every platform that issues a tokenised bond, fund or slice of private equity has tended to build its own rules for how that token behaves: how a transfer is checked against a whitelist, how an asset is frozen when a cour

Real world asset tokenisation has matured from white paper to working infrastructure. The question for UK founders and operators is now less whether it works, and more what the stack actually looks like end to end.

For the past three years, tokenised finance has had a structural problem: the infrastructure for digital assets and the infrastructure for traditional securities have lived in separate systems, requiring separate workflows, separate reconciliation, and separate governance. Broadridge, the post-trade

There are proofs of concept and there are proofs of function. The distinction matters enormously in institutional finance, where the gap between a demonstration and something that actually works under real-world conditions is often where promising technologies go to stall. On 6 May 2026, Ondo Financ

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation processes roughly $2.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually. It is the central clearinghouse for US equities, bonds and derivatives, the infrastructure through which virtually every institutional trade in the world's largest capital market is settled. When DTCC moves, the industry adjusts its assumptions.vOn 4 May 2026, DTCC moved.

On 29 April 2026, the Financial Conduct Authority published Policy Statement PS26/7, confirming its final rules and guidance for fund tokenisation in the UK. The document follows the regulator's consultation paper CP25/28, published in October 2025, and marks a significant step forward in the UK's digital securities strategy. The policy statement does two things of immediate practical consequence. First, it sets out how authorised fund managers can use distributed ledger t

Tradeweb's Q1 2026 earnings call, held on 29 April, marks a different kind of moment. The platform reported $10 million in quarterly revenue directly attributed to commercial activity on the Canton Network — the distributed ledger infrastructure purpose-built for institutional digital asset deployment. That is not a pilot. That is a revenue line. What Tradeweb Reported Tradeweb Markets, which operates one of the world's largest electronic fixed income and derivatives tr

HM Treasury unveiled a comprehensive payment services regulatory integration plan on 21 April 2026 — during UK Fintech Week — designed to bring stablecoins, tokenised bank deposits, and conventional electronic payments under one coherent legal roof. The package proposes new legislation to reduce administrative burdens for firms seeking to provide stablecoin payment services, whilst expanding the FCA's regulatory powers over Open Banking developments.

The most consistent objection from traditional banks to adopting stablecoin infrastructure has been this: "We don't want to hold crypto." On April 8, 2026, Circle answered that objection directly. Circle Payments Network (CPN) Managed Payments is a full-stack stablecoin settlement platform that allows banks, payment service providers (PSPs), and fintechs to settle transactions in USDC — without ever holding or managing digital assets themselves. Circle handles the entire d

The UK’s biggest banks are quietly transforming the financial system that startup founders rely on. Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, and Monzo are all involved in building tokenised banking infrastructure. This is not a crypto experiment or a speculative venture. It is the existing financial system being upgraded from within, using digital tokens to represent traditional assets like sterling deposits. Many founders associate tokenisation with fundrai

Most founders do not spend much time thinking about their cap table beyond the immediate needs of a funding round. It is created, updated and maintained as part of the process. Lawyers and advisors ensure everything is recorded correctly. Spreadsheets are shared. Documents are signed. The system works, but it is not particularly elegant.